List of points

Feel the responsibility of your mission: the whole of Heaven is looking down on you.

My child, my little donkey: if the Lord, with Love, has washed your grimy back, so accustomed to the muck, and has laid a satin harness on you, and covered you with dazzling jewels, don’t forget, poor donkey, that with your faults you could throw that beautiful load on to the ground… But on your own you couldn’t put it back on again.

God has a special right over us, his children: it is the right to our response to his love, in spite of our failings. This inescapable truth puts us under an obligation which we cannot shirk. But it also gives us complete confidence: we are instruments in the hands of God, instruments that he relies on every day. That is why, every day, we struggle to serve him.

The work of the Church, each day, is a great fabric which we offer to God: because all of us who are baptised are the Church.

—If we carry out our tasks faithfully and selflessly, this great fabric will be beautiful and flawless. But if someone loosens a thread here, someone else a thread there, and another somewhere else… instead of a beautiful fabric we will have a tattered rag.